Revolutionary Culture

By Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, Le Monde diplomatique,
January 2004

ONE way of seeing culture is as a heritage, a long river that flows
down through generations, transmitting moral and aesthetic values,
ideologies, versions of history and symbols: new generations receive
the cultural heritage created by previous generations, provided that
there are channels and ports that allow this enormous gift to be
properly given and received.

Revolutionaries, who question history, have always kept their distance
from this idea of cultural heritage, regarding it as the product of
former ruling classes that controlled the course of history but have
since been overthrown. The French Revolution and the Russian
Revolution both quarantined their inherited culture and denounced it
as feudal, belonging to the class just defeated. At the time of the
Soviet Revolution, probably the most radical of revolutions, there was
a famous debate over proletarian and class culture. Some theoreticians
of the revolution favoured a clean slate, the eradication of inherited
culture to be replaced with the culture of the new proletarian class.

This was strongly opposed by Leon Trotsky, who was fiercely intent on
the preservation of cultural heritage. He argued that, because there
had been political change, culture had ceased to be bourgeois and had
become simply human. So the revolution should make sure that the
values of this culture were assimilated by everybody, with the
intention of inaugurating a new historical era.

This was an early approach to solving the problem: what makes a
cultural heritage reactionary is not the heritage itself but the way
that reactionaries use it and deny most people access to it. There are
simple remedies: opening libraries to foster reading; encouraging
artistic production and bringing in audiences to widen enjoyment of
the arts; and avoiding the kind of market-based culture exclusively
enjoyed by certain social strata.

Of course there is another way of seeing culture—in its most
omnipresent form, as consciousness. All humans have a culture as soon
as they become conscious of their relations with others and with
nature. A series of ideas of culture is based on this given. Culture
covers everything involved in a self's conciousness of being, of
existence, of relations with the world and others. That is why it is
stupid to say that some people have culture and others do not. All who
are aware of what they are and what they do, and above all of their
role in relation to others, have culture. Nobody can be excluded from
the realm of culture.
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Based on the ideas of culture as heritage and as consciousness, there
have traditionally been two forms of political manipulation of
culture. There are the cultural politics of reaction—integrating
culture-as-heritage and culture-as-consciousness into a body of
established truths, defined by power, thus turning access to culture
into a means for people to come to terms with the established
order. At best, cultural policies of the right, of the forces of
reaction, use culture as a means of integration, where necessary going
on to mutilate, control, falsify and mystify culture (all these are
characteristic of eras of fascism).

Progressive forces take political awareness as their starting
point. They question the established order and intend to transform it
for the better; this conditions their view of
culture-as-consciousness. The left has seldom gone beyond attempts to
take culture-as-heritage and make it instrumental to its
objectives. All cultural politics of the left should be based on an
unreserved acceptance and assimil ation of cultural
heritage. Progressive cultural politics must promote critical
consciousness as a way to modify views, and consider the development
of class consciousness as a superior form of culture. Such politics
need to take into account the development of the dynamic of history in
terms of an overall idea of progress. This is difficult, because it
gives the left the enormous job of rethinking the very idea of
progress itself.

Cornelius Castoriadis said that the great choice of our time was
between socialism or barbarism, counterposing two different cultures,
opposing ideas of the historical relationship governing systems of the
organisation of life, production and human relations; one based on
benefits and material well-being for history's ruling minorities;
the other based on socialism, in rational opposition to barbarism,
which could create new human relations, a new culture and the
possibility of a new consciousness of the human role in the
world. Socialism is presented as a real cultural crossroads, the point
from which cultural change could be reached.

TS Eliot, a fine poet of the right, defined the meaning of given
cultural situations. He thought that contemporary people should
understand that cultural givens existed and that they continued within
the dialectical relationship between tradition and revolution. Each
era had a cultural tradition that clashed with its critical
consciousness. This confrontation between inherited culture and
critical consciousness produced the possibility of continuity. We
should thank Eliot for identifying this mechanism for understanding
culture.

Progressive forces, in their commitment to progressive culture (not
reserved just for the left), take on tradition and cultural heritage,
and opting for revolution, add a critical awareness. But to achieve
their aim they have to offer the world a vision, related to the choice
between socialism or barbarism: they must find ways to survive despite
destruction. When this first struggle for survival has been won, the
second objective must be to create a culture of equality: that does
not mean a culture of uniformity, but a culture intended to satisfy
the needs, including cultural needs, of all humans.

The third objective must be a culture that liberates and struggles
against alienation—not in the Marxist sense (in which people are
deprived of the means of production, do not own what they produce and
become alienated), but in a broader sense: liberation from negative
ideas that prevent critical thought, liberation that brings freedom of
collective and individual behaviour in politics, morality and
sexuality.

The fourth objective must be to reclaim peace as the highest cultural
value. War must be denounced as counter-revolutionary, as the threat
of war is intended to establish a culture of fear that paralyses
consciousnesses and makes people more conser vative. Peace is
revolutionary because it is predicated on change. Peace frees creative
energies, freedom of expression, realisation and transfor mation. The
forces of progress are in the majority, and when they realise this the
partisans of all that is conservative will be isolated. The left has
to fight on two fronts: to defend its own critical awareness and to
struggle against the state of fear that is now presented to us as the
highest of cultural values. And the left must always fight for
cultural heritage to be made accessible to everybody.

* The Spanish writer Manuel Vázquez Montalbán died on 18 October 2003
after a lifetime fighting injustice and social inequality. He was a
frequent contributor to Le Monde diplomatique. This unpublished text
is taken from a speech in Alicante in 2001

Translated by Ed Emery
<http://MondeDiplo.com/2004/01/17montalban>

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